A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) Read Free Page B

visitors now, during leaf season, but that only lasts a few weeks. Most businesses make seventy percent of their income in about three months’ time. Things get pretty quiet after that.”
    “Doesn’t that make it hard to make a living?” I asked.
    The waitress shrugged. “In a way, I guess. If we run into a summer with bad weather, and the tourists stay home, it can be tough, but I’ve lived here all my life and always managed. Probably I’d make more money if I lived somewhere else, but New Bern is a good place to raise my kids. Can’t see that making more money would make me any happier, so I guess I’m here to stay.”
    We had been talking for quite a while. Standing near the bar, the maitre d’ shot the waitress a look that reminded her she had other tables.
    “Is there anything else I can get for you?” she asked quickly.
    “No, thank you. Just a check.”
    She pulled the already-prepared bill out of her black apron pocket and placed it on the table. “It was nice talking to you,” she said. “I hope you enjoy your trip. If you get a chance, drive over to the nature preserve and walk the trails. They’re real pretty this time of year.”
    “Thanks. I’ll do that.”
    I’d planned to do some window-shopping after lunch, but changed my mind when a motor coach pulled up and disgorged a swarm of camera-wielding senior citizens onto the sidewalk. Instead, I crossed the street and took a walk on the Green, hoping the crowd of seniors would disperse by the time I returned.
    The Green, I soon learned, is just a quaint word for a municipal park that marks the center of town and is a fixture in most New England villages. In New Bern, the Green is a block wide and three blocks long. Commerce and Elm Streets run on its long, east/west edges; Maple and Church streets bound the shorter sides. Those four are the most important thoroughfares in town, though I would later learn that Proctor Street, which parallels the back side of Elm, is where the real mansions are. Those homes, owned by old Yankees with old money, with layers of trees and hedges to camouflage them from prying eyes, don’t look like much from the road. But once you get past the overgrown shrubbery you’ll discover grounds dotted with tennis courts, swimming pools, and carriage houses surrounding stately, enormous homes that rarely change hands. The owners’ last names match those of the oldest headstones in the cemetery. In this part of the world, amassing a great fortune is considered admirable; flaunting it is not.
    I took my time strolling through the Green, gazing up at the tapestry of brilliant-leaved trees. Some, towering overhead like massive columns, had obviously been there for decades if not centuries. Others, more recently planted, with slender, pliable trunks, were scattered haphazardly on the carpet of grass. Hardy yellow and orange mums mounded in indiscriminately placed flowerbeds near bushes of purplish hydrangeas at their peak and leggy geraniums that were far past it. But for the sidewalks cutting through the park at tidy right angles until they met at the granite memorial to the Civil War dead, the Green would have given the impression of nature run amok. Instead, the feeling was one of humanity imposing order upon nature, but lightly, respectfully, recognizing that, while they might adapt and make use of the natural world, the people of New Bern weren’t so arrogant as to suppose they could control it.
    It’s like a quilt , I thought to myself as I approached the war memorial. All the different patches of green coming together to make a whole. That’s why I feel so comfortable here.
    I’d made my first quilt twenty-five years before, when I was expecting Garrett. From that moment on, I was hooked. I love quilting, the sheer geometry of it, the endless patterns and combinations that can be achieved by the arrangement and rearrangement of something as simple as a straight line. The order and precision of quilting appeals to